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1,000 From State Raise Voices in Demanding an End to War; Protesters Say D.C. Rally Shows Growing Exasperation With U.S. Role in Iraq

Posted on: Sunday, 25 September 2005, 15:00 CDT

Washington More than 100,000 people made the streets their stage Saturday, hoping to send the world a message distilled by one protester into three words: "Troops Home Now."

The boisterous march to end the war in Iraq saw people from across the nation raise voices, hoist placards and sound drums.

Cindy Sheehan, whose son, Casey, was killed in Iraq last year, was the event's leading lady. Her vigil at President Bush's ranch may be over, but her celebrity in Washington seemed only to grow.

"We're not going home till every last one of our troops are home," the California woman told an exultant crowd Saturday, the first of three days of planned protests.

"We mean business, George Bush," she said. "We're going to Congress, and we're going to ask them: How many more of other people's children are you willing to sacrifice?"

Before her, a colorful sea of humanity: college students and lawyers, nuns and veterans, federal workers and farm wives.

Familiar faces, and new ones

Some faces were familiar to the protest movement, from Joan Baez to the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Others were new to the asphalt teeming with messages by turn political, profane, spiritual and scatological.

Thousands of people attended smaller rallies in cities on the West Coast, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Franciso and Seattle.

Sheehan inspired Wausau's Nancy Schulz, 50, who runs a cleaning business, to join her first protest march. "As an individual, she was able to transform her sense of grief into action," she said.

Schulz was one of about 1,000 people from Wisconsin who turned out, organizers said.

Nancy Utesch, 41, of Kewaunee marched with a hand-painted sign: "Peace for Wisconsin and the Rest of the Nation."

She paid $250 so she and a daughter, Addie, 12, could make the 20- hour trip on a bus from Manitowoc.

"Even if I'm just one more person, I just had to be at this rally," said Utesch, who left behind four other children, her husband and a 150-acre cattle farm

Her motivation?

Last spring she stopped at a shop in Green Bay, where a memorial of photographs and tributes was posted for a soldier who died in Iraq. Utesch remembers the shop owner's words "It was the boy next door."

She doesn't know his name, but she can't shake those words.

In Washington, a few hundred people in a counter-demonstration in support of Bush's Iraq policy lined the protest route near the FBI building. The two groups shouted at each other, a police line keeping them apart. Organizers of a pro-military rally today hoped for 10,000 people.

And about 150 counter-demonstrators rallied at the U.S. Navy Memorial.

Another perspective

Gary Qualls, 48, of Temple, Texas, whose Marine reservist son, Louis, died last year in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, asked: "If you bring them home now, who's going to be responsible for all the atrocities that are fixing to happen over there? Cindy Sheehan?"

With temperatures in the low 70s, and gray overcast skies scattering occasional raindrops, the weather was mild. The antiwar rhetoric was not.

Many called for Bush's impeachment. "Pink slip Bush," was the message borne by a woman wearing just that: a pink slip. Three in orange prison jumpsuits and handcuffs wore masks of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

"Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam," a T-shirt warned.

While people decried the war dead from U.S. and Iraq, they were quick to vocalize concerns about the suffering from hurricanes in the Gulf states.

"Make levees, not war," one banner urged. "Bush is a Category Five Disaster," said another.

Protesters from state

Julie Enslow, a coordinator with Peace Action Wisconsin, said about 700 of the estimated 1,000 from the state came in 14 buses.

Peter Earle, 55, a Shorewood attorney, rode a bus with his 18- year-old son, Petey. "When I was 18, my father put me on a bus to protest the war in Vietnam here," Earle said. "Now I am proud to come here with my son.

"Just the thought that a member of my family could be killed in this war is absurd and intolerable," said Earle, whose nephew just returned from military service in Iraq. "I don't have the words to express the anger that I feel."

Others from Wisconsin came on their own, including Donovan Riley, 68, of Oconomowoc, who joined the march with his daughter, Claire, a lawyer in Washington, and her children, Elle, 16, Oscar, 10, and Alaysha, 8.

"We were misled to get into this war in the first place," Riley said. "Now we need a timetable for an orderly withdrawal ASAP. This is the future my grandchildren are going to inherit."

Nathan Warnberg, 22, president of Students for Peace and Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, said his group often is taunted at its campus protests.

Finding support

Surveying the crowd near White House, Warnberg said, "We get yelled at all the time in Platteville, but seeing all this makes us want to keep going."

"Cheddarheads for peace," said David Meinhardt, who teaches communications at UW-Platteville and is the group's faculty adviser.

Law enforcement officials did not release a crowd estimate. Sgt. Scott Fear, a U.S. Park Police spokesman, said the numbers surpassed the agency's expectations.

"So far, so good. It's peaceful," judged Washington Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey during the mid-afternoon. "They probably have met their goal of at least 100,000 people."

Police by then reported two arrests for destruction of property and one for disorderly conduct.

Organizers of the march estimated the crowd at 200,000 or more. "There's a surge in opposition to this war," said William K. Dobbs of United for Peace & Justice, a key sponsor. "We hope people go back even more energized to work harder to stop it."

Daniel W. Reilly of the Journal Sentinel staff, also reporting from Washington, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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